The operational value of inter-constellation cooperation

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Gribben, Joshua and Clark, Ruaridh and Macdonald, Malcolm (2026) The operational value of inter-constellation cooperation. Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets. ISSN 0022-4650 (In Press)

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Abstract

Earth’s orbital environment is becoming increasingly populated with large satellite constellations operated by a diverse range of stakeholders. Opportunities for inter-constellation cooperation increase as more satellites enter orbit. It is shown that smaller constellations benefit greatly from cooperation with larger constellations, while larger constellations experience diminishing, but non-negligible, returns from this cooperation as the overall network size increases. These improvements accumulate as the number of cooperators increases thereby incentivizing cooperation from large constellations and encouraging them to foster growth in small constellations, revealing a potential foundation for a new operation model for large constellation operators. Delay Tolerant Networking protocols are applied to demonstrate the value of cooperation between constellations of varying sizes. The paper explores and quantifies the changes in data delivery times, network hop-count, and traffic capacity when satellite constellations cooperate using inter-satellite communication links. To generate the contact plans for large cooperating constellations, an abstraction of the orbital environment, called Matryoshka Orbital Networks (MatrON), is applied that consolidates multiple constellations into a single, heterogeneous system of systems. MatrON is shown to consume less CPU time and less RAM than an SGP4 propagation routine on the same platform and produces a solution with a variance of <8%.

ORCID iDs

Gribben, Joshua ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-1283-7081, Clark, Ruaridh ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4601-2085 and Macdonald, Malcolm ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4499-4281;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)